Untying the Personal-Political Knot in My Perestroika

Eight-millimeter home movies and statist hymns from the Soviet past haunt Robin Hessmans documentary of a contemporary Russia pocked with international logos, in which five Muscovites recall their lives and, in the process, 40 years of national history. A married couple, teachers Borya and Lyuba Meyerson, testify for the camera alongside Boryas grade-school classmates, now middle-aged: Andrei, a well-off clothier; Olga, a single mother working for a billiard-table rental company; and Ruslan, a retired rock star not reconciled to the new world. Each tells a parallel story of mandatory youth-group membership during the Brezhnev 70s, the disorder of perestroika, the optimistic euphoria of 1991s demonstrations, and the subsequent onset of adult pragmatism and disillusionthe latter clearly evident after the election of Putins appointed successor, Medvedev. The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history, even as Hessman occasionally overreaches to create anti-capitalist anxiety, as when loading a scene of Andrei dictating company dress code with ominous significance. Adaptable Andrei thrives, as he probably would in any circumstance, while reactionary Ruslan shelters good-old-days memories from the reality of his still-gigging sell out ex-bandmates. The oddest evidence of Soviet-era cultural totality, however, is vintage footage of the band barking doctrinaire anti-authoritarianism, party-line punk.